I was watching a recording of the recent Apple event in September, where they were launching the iPhone 6s and iPad Pro. During the iPad Pro demo, they brought onstage several people to help demo the product. One of those people was Kirk Koenigsbauer, Corporate VP of Microsoft Office. I had to rewind the video to make sure I saw that correctly:

Microsoft was onstage at the Apple event?

I immediately texted a few coworkers and asked if they had seen it. That’s something that, two years ago, I never would have believed could happen. Fast forward a few weeks and you see Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, speaking at the Salesforce conference called Dreamforce. That’s another fierce competitor of theirs in the CRM space and an unlikely partner a few years ago.

During one of the Dreamforce segments, Satya said Microsoft’s mission was “empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.” The full conversation can be found here.

​These partnerships start to make sense when you think of it in those terms. In order to achieve that goal, Microsoft has to be willing to open up their offering to people that don’t want or need every single product they make. Let’s face it, not every customer is going to use all of the Microsoft stack, so trying to force that on everyone is an exercise in futility. I believe that was one of their weaknesses in the recent past and it’s great to see the options opening up.

Some of the early steps of this mindset change was the introduction of cross-browser support for programs like Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Earlier versions of the product required Internet Explorer and wouldn’t work on things like an iPhone or iPad, which seemed silly considering how many of those devices are in use these days. From experience, I can tell you how difficult it was to sell that message to prospects. “Just get everyone Windows phones and have a dual boot MacBook with Windows loaded so you can open CRM with Internet Explorer…” People would roll their eyes or kick us out of their office when they heard these things. Other products like Salesforce already worked on multiple browsers and it was very hard to compete with them.

As a Microsoft partner, many of our clients have invested heavily in Microsoft ERP and CRM technologies so this opens up a lot of options for them. On the flip side, we also work with non-Microsoft products like Intacct cloud accounting software. For those customers, I love the idea that they can run Intacct (or any other solution) and still be able to integrate with some of the core productivity tools like Office.

At the end of the day, people want choice of products. The idea of best-of-breed systems, combining several different products, is very common these days. The product mix that works best for one company isn’t always the same as another - even if they are in same industry.

​I think the consumer wins in these situations and that’s what’s encouraging to me. The goal of our business, like many others, is to improve the performance of our clients. The software solution is less important than the business process, and the collaboration between companies like Apple, Salesforce, and Microsoft gives us all more options to work with.